Keybase and Stellar: Partnership Announcement

We’re very pleased to announce that Stellar is working with Keybase through a special instance of SDF’s partnership grant program. Keybase has created a general set of cryptographically secure tools (chat, file storage, git) and we encourage you to check them out.

We’re most interested in their ground-breaking effort to link strong cryptography to real-world identity. We see a future where, say, I can send my friend 100XLM, and, via Keybase, I can send it to her by knowing only her Twitter or Reddit handle. I won’t need some long string of digits as a key, just a human-readable username that I already know. In short, I can interact with her financially in the same way I interact with her socially. The end product would be like a global, decentralized Venmo, where you can send around every asset under the sun, not just your local currency—that’s where money is heading, and we want to get Stellar started along the path.

Our financial contribution to Keybase will be a mix of the piteously over-centralized U.S. dollar, whose value, if you can believe it, depends entirely on the whim of a few government officials, and then XLM.

Our agreement with Keybase entails many practical Stellar-centric deliverables. Rather than giving out a list now and spinning up yet another crypto hype-cycle, we’ll announce products jointly with them as they’re completed or near completion. We know the Keybase team very well and expect they will create critical Stellar ecosystem components over the coming years.

More about Keybase

Keybase shares many of our views on privacy and centralization, namely that mandating government “backdoors” into secure services for “emergency” purposes is a horrible idea.

Keybase has a world-class development team. The Keybase founders were previously founders of SparkNotes and OkCupid. The team as a whole has a long history of creating impactful, consumer-friendly products. We can’t think of any group of developers we’d rather see contribute to the Stellar ecosystem. They do an excellent job of explaining why a Stellar + Keybase partnership makes sense from their perspective here, and we encourage you to read it.

Keybase has about 200,000 users and is growing fast. There is now an open stellar team on Keybase. Anyone can join the team to discuss Stellar, Stellar + Keybase, and so on. Get in on the namespace now, before crypto_baggins or vitalikjesus11 or levered_homeowner or whatever is taken. You’re going to want something good for your global public key alias when we take over the world.